Making the New Notes Christoph Noack OpenOffice.org User Experience Max Odendahl OpenOffice.org Development Christian Jansen Sun Microsystems CommunityConcepts Cooperation

3 Making the New Notes CommunityConceptsCooperation

4 Making the New Notes CommunityConceptsCooperation

5 Introduction to Notes2 ● Notes2 is an activity to improve the existing notes functionality in OpenOffice.org Writer ● Notes2 has been developed with major community involvement ● Notes2 solved about 100 issue tracker entries ● Notes2 has been rewarded in the “OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Program Awards” (Technical, Core) ● First results are contained in OpenOffice.org 3.0 Question: Do you remember the past?

6 Notes in Previous Versions Result:

7 Notes in OpenOffice.org 3.0 Result:

8 Start of the Activity

9 The Implementation Team User ExperienceDevelopment Documentation Quality Assurance … supported by the whole OpenOffice.org community! Christoph Noack Community Max Odendahl Community Mathias Bauer Sun Microsystems Christian Jansen Sun Microsystems Éric Savary Sun Microsystems Uwe Fischer Sun Microsystems Mentor

10 Making the New Notes CommunityConceptsCooperation

11 Working Steps ● Cooperation does mean: “come together, clarify what to do, work on it, realize something useful” ● The “working steps” show one classic approach Problem Concepts Design Requirem ents Engineeri ng Test and Feedback Code Developm ent Sounds easy? Let's look at the first step...

12 Understanding the Problem An IRC chat was the first “official” team meeting. Oh dear... ● We did not know each other (personal goals, previous work in the community, skills,...) ● We knew the single issues of the notes, but lacked understanding for the common goal ● We had no agenda, we just started to discuss Experience: ● A face-to-face kick-off meeting or phone conference in the first phase may be helpful ● Formulating a project goal helps to keep the focus

13 Requirements Engineering ● Roadmap and design concepts are based on requirements (collection of information, prioritization, definition of terms) ● Information sources: ● Use cases (“brainstorming”) ● Competitor analysis (different office applications) ● Requests for enhancements (issue tracker entries, feedback on community mailing lists) ● Experience of the implementation team Question: Do we have some examples for that?

14 Requirements Engineering Working with Use Cases High-level requirements: ● Identify the stakeholders ● Collect use cases in the document life cycle Experience: ● Judges facts, not preferences ● Very good completeness ● Effort may be high, you need to convince others Example Requirement StR 49: If the user exports a document, he wishes to be informed if notes are not visible. Use Case: User A edited a document and filtered some notes. Then, he sends the document via e- mail. Thus, he wishes to be informed of information which is not visible. Comments: Alternative is to change the default; deactivate the export of notes. Source: Hint: It also helps to look at the competition.

15 Requirements Engineering Competitor Analysis Word processor “Softmaker TextMaker 2006” ● Notes similar to Microsoft Word 2003 ● Example: Page contains many notes → notes not really usable (overlay, cut-off) ● Similar behavior in first Apple Pages Finding: Robust and scalable functionality required

16 Requirements Engineering Competitor Analysis Presentation program “Microsoft Powerpoint 2003” ● Notes are handled like small graphic objects ● Example: ● Click on anchor to open note window ● Select text → text looks being editable ● Pressing 'Del' removes the note! Finding: Be clear in communicating different states to the user Del ju1 Nunc ac erat vel nisi mollis vestibulum. Donec purus tadolom. Joe User mollis vestibulum ju1 Nunc ac erat vel nisi mollis vestibulum. Donec purus tadolom. Joe User

17 Communication Channels ● Remote collaboration can work well! ● The tools are not that important (but we re-think their use)

18 Communication Wiki Store common knowledge, e.g.: ● Project details ● Goals and requirements ● Development roadmap ● Proposals, concepts, mockups Experience: ● Great for getting feedback ● Use it as soon as possible ● Care about the structure Source:

19 Communication Discussions and Decisions Examples: procedure, roadmap planning, design decisions Experience: ● Decisions should not be made by the whole team in general → establish guidelines accepted by the team ● Planning for a certain release didn't work well → define minimum feature and quality requirements ● The foundation provides a certain set of capabilities → identify technical constraints as soon as possible

20 Making the New Notes CommunityConceptsCooperation

21 Design Proposals “Notes Window” Visual evolution of the note window and the options buttons / / | notes text | ----/ | notes text | | notes text | : : | Author/Dat |

22 Design Proposals “Advanced Text Editing”

23 Implemented Design “Colors” Notes author colors are based on other OpenOffice.org colors Result: New colors are consistent, fresh, accessibility tested

24 Features Being Worked On The framework is now ready for advanced functionality. ● Grouping of notes belonging together ● “Reply-To-Note” to answer existing notes ● Better integration with change tracking comments ● Improved anchors, e.g. new anchors for text areas (e.g. referring to words)

25 Ideas for Future Versions “Printing” ● Printing has still room for improvement ● Specification drafts available for: ● Printing notes windows next to document ● Printing notes text only There are still many other ideas... Help is appreciated.

26 Making the New Notes CommunityConceptsCooperation

27 Summary Community ● Success? A feature improvement at least... ● We think, the community does have impact! Collaboration ● Remote collaboration does work! ● Working has been much fun and sometimes exhausting! Concepts ● Not everything is perfect, yet. There will be improvements! ● Many ideas still flying around. And now? Start your project and share your experience!

OpenOffice.org User Experience Team ux.openoffice.org